Limerick entrepreneur and world’s youngest self-made billionaire reveals ten years ago he was ‘still figuring out how businesses worked’

John Collison founded online payments company Stripe with brother Patrick with the company now headquartered in Silicon Valley

Nicola Bardon

24 Jul 2018, 17:58

"TEN years ago I was a nerdy kid in Ireland wondering how businesses worked", said Irish billionaire John Collison.

The 27-year-old co-founded online payments company Stripe with his older brother Patrick.

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John Collison, founder of StripeCredit: Times Newspapers Ltd

And while Kylie Jenner is currently being billed to take over as the youngest ever self-made billionaire, John currently holds the title, beating Snapchat creator Evan Spiegel.

While the company is now headquartered in Silicon Valley, he said coming from Ireland made him want his business to be global.

He said: “Often times it is the case, certainly the case in Ireland,you can feel like an outsider looking in. And you can feel like all these people who have it, whatever it is, who have it figured out and the truth is there’s no one recipe, there’s no one rule book, and many people find their path through somewhat surprising ways.”

And he added of his success: “Ten years ago I was in Ireland, I was figuring out how all this stuff worked.”

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John currently holds the title of youngest ever self-made billionaireCredit: Getty - Contributor

The Limerick brothers had already started and sold a successful company when they were teenagers, Auctomatic, which was a better selling platform for eBay.

When he was just 17, they sold it for over €4.2m.

He completed his Leaving Cert, earning 8 A1s and 2 A2s, and was accepted into Harvard to study physics before he had even sat his exams.

However, John soon dropped out after the brothers’ next venture became a worldwide success.

He continued: “I wasn’t planning on dropping out, I didn’t want to drop out. But one of the interesting things about a company like Stripe is in the early days, you get to choose the timing of how things work but it’s sort of like pushing a rock down a hill. You start pushing it and after a while it starts gaining its own momentum, its choosing the speed.

“After a little while with Stripe it was starting to gather momentum and more and more customers were adopting it and the point at which it has momentum all of its own.

“So in the case of Stripe, we started it part time while we were in university and then we were really faced with a question, do we really want to go full time on this and really invest in seeing how successful we can make it or stay on college?

“We could do both in the beginning but there was a point where we had to choose. And it felt like too good of an opportunity to pass up. It felt like it would be irresponsible to pass it up.”

And he said one of the secrets to their success was that they started small with their costs, as they both knew how to code.

He added: “That immediately lowers the cost and lowers the barrier to starting an internet business. If you think about it, if you aren’t able to write software, for starting an internet business the first thing you do is incur a bunch of bills to fund some software development to get things off the ground.

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John used to study in HarvardCredit: Getty - Contributor

“Whereas in the early stage of an internet business, it is all about finding a product that works, and you can’t put a timeline on it… It’s going to be a long period of experimenting until you finally find the product that takes off and so what was useful for us was we were able to build the first version of the product, build the first version of Stripe and continue doing so

“For a long time it was just the two of us working on the product so we could keep costs very low until we had a product that was actually showing some meaningful traction and then we could go out and make some money for investors.”

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And he said that love for all things online has been in them since they were kids.

He told CNBC Africa while on a tech visit to the country with former US leader Barack Obama: “For us having fun, a big part of it was coding and playing with computers.

“Different people get drawn to different endeavours but for us we were always definitely the nerdy kids- studying, doing math and science and messing with computers, certainly by the time we were teenagers.”